Talking gooderer

As workplace consultants we often get asked to help individuals and teams to improve how well they communicate.

This is rarely the request though. Workplaces will often approach us with the following problems:

Someone in the team has partitioned themselves off from everyone (literally like moving their desk or mentally by socially withdrawing). How do we get them to engage.

Someone has said they don’t feel safe in my team. How do I support them?

We have a manager who knows everything technical but nobody likes them. How do we help them?

A worker lost their temper and yelled at a colleague. What do we do?

I cant get team members to share the information they need for the team to perform well. What do we do?

When we assess what factors are leading to these behaviours, rarely do we have someone who is naughty, or deliberately being insolent or malicious. What we often find is a workplace culture which for various reasons has lead to staff turning away from, instead of towards, each other.

How do you help people to improve their ability to connect? It starts with foundation interpersonal skills. If you want to facilitate people turning towards each other then both parties need to have skills in how to talk AND more importantly how to listen.

Preventing burnout in the workplace, Talking gooderer, Mindset Training

How to respond to questions with conversational threads so that the respondent has something to grab on to. Ever been at a party trying to make small talk and you are getting nada? For example you ask “where are you from?” and they say “Sydney”. Cool cool cool. “Um, how long have you lived there?” “6 years”. How much easier is it when you ask “where are you from?” and they say something like: “I live in Sydney at the moment. We moved here 6 years ago when my partner got a transfer with his work in construction. We decided to move to the beach because the kids just love the water, we all do. Our best holidays were when we were by the ocean”. That gives you as the respondent a whole bunch of information to respond to. You could ask about the kids, the holidays, the partner’s work etc etc.

How to actually listen. The most common way we listen is to hear what is said then wait until our turn to speak. When we are actively listening we hear what is said and reflect back the key messages and emotions of what was expressed. This skill is a huge part of counselling and people describe active listeners as easy to talk to, someone who makes them feel heard and understood.

When everyone in the team makes a small effort to do a little better at talking and listening, people feel safer to share their concerns, to disagree in a healthy way and to get along in spite of differences.

We don’t all naturally learn to talk good – sometimes specific skill building can be helpful to improve how leaders, teams and staff communicate with each other (to talk gooder lol).

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